Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine - The World War I ...

ZIONISM AND PALESTINE 119
will proceed not from agnostic indifference, but from
sympathetic understanding no longer qualified by the
fear that concession will merely invite encroachment.
Zionism is admittedly a departure from ordinary
colonizing processes; an act of faith. To this extent,
therefore, "impartiality" is condemned by Zionists as
anti-Zionistic: he that is not for me is against me—
a Mr. Facing-both-ways, like a Neutral in the War.
Their attitude may be justified as anyhow constructive:
you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs:
"to do a great right, do a little wrong." Will anyone
assert that Palestinian Arabs can hope to have the predominance
they expected, and but for Zionism would
have enjoyed, in Palestine? 1 What is less justifiable
(and much less helpful to the cause) is the assumption
that the smallest criticism of any Zionist method or
proposal is equivalent to anti-Zionism, even to anti-
Semitism. 2 Such critics must remember that there are
many good friends of Zion, there are even many Jews,
who hold that the Balfour Declaration cannot be implemented
by Great Britain or any other Mandatory
because its parts are mutually destructive and incompatible,
and that an unwillingness to recognize this can
only breed gratuitous and unnecessary additional
trouble: in short that unless we are prepared in the
final event to see the history of the first coming repeated
(when the fate of each group of inhabitants was that
"they drave them utterly out") we should not have
1 The Mufti is on unshakable ground when he declares, to the
Royal Commission: "We have not the least power, nothing to
do with the administration of the country, and we are completely
unrepresented."
2 " . . . There is no harm in that [divergences of Zionist opinion] ;
it only becomes dangerous when these different sections insist
not merely that the object shall be carried out, but that it should
be carried out precisely in the fashion that commends itself to
them. Beware of that danger; I am not sure it is not the greatest
danger which may beset you in the future." (From speech by
Balfour to Albert Hall Jewish meeting in July 1920.)